Localising games the right way with Kayla Madsen of TransPerfect Gaming

[Music] [Music] we are joined by kayla manson the director of gaming emea at transpar for gaming how are you doing today great thank you so this is a real easy interview for me because i'm genuinely fascinated by a localization in all its forms and the ways you can do it right and the way that a lot of us see it done very wrong so what is it that you guys do at transfer that's a great question so basically we provide a whole suite of services around localization from adapting the actual content both from the text translation but also from cultural nuances legal regulations providing localization and linguistic quality assurance testing after the game you know has been translated and all the way through to audio recording or potentially community management or player support in any language so are you saying that it's not just you put it into google translate and then it's done

correct correct that's a common misconception in the industry that google translate is enough um for certain types of content or certain um language tests you know pilots it might be okay but we use or think of it more as a productivity tool these days where there's a combination of machine translation and human translation but most of the time for gaming it really requires a human touch to make sure it's perfectly adapted for each market gotcha so beyond just the translation itself there's a lot of other things to consider like the way that different cultures react to certain cultural signifiers there's ui there's even the way that transactions are conducted in different places so when someone brings a game to you to localize where do you start what's the first thing you look at yeah the first thing we tend to look at is just understanding what the business goals are or the business objectives of that game right in terms of is it increasing number of players is it you know they're already located or they're already selling in a

certain market but they want to increase that player engagement or increase the uh you know retention of the players so looking at what the customer or the gamer the game company's goals are and then based on their goals we can create a plan right if we need to do cultural analysis of the content if we need to advise on certain things that need to be cut out and then how to start adapting it right from the translation of the words to potentially visuals or recording of audio or dialogues within the game so is it something that developers need to be factoring in right from the beginning of development or do you get a lot of people just it's an afterthought it's something they kind of bring to you once the game is complete and then you have a lot of work to do afterwards that's correct i actually gave a presentation this morning on the risks of translation being an afterthought or localization because what ends up happening is if it's then left till the very end it's rushed they usually skip best practices you don't have enough time to do all the steps and then you end up having like a poor quality result

of your game right so it is important that localization is thought of earlier in the process um specifically because of what you mentioned before that icons colors different things can be considered very different in different markets and then for example you have things like expansion right in german text will expand by 35 whereas in like nordic languages or in english it will reduce by up to 15 so the spatial requirements for the text or the content is also very different and if it's not thought of up front it can be a very problematic later on this is where you get text spilling off the edge of the screen and i'd consider that one but what about regional app stores because every i mean just getting things onto the app stores generally speaking is hard work and there's a lot of kind of barriers you have to jump over and loopholes to go through but then regionally again there's lots of different rules and regulations to get to you guys help with that as well right absolutely yeah so based on what markets you're trying to get into and what's your you know target player audience we have different ways of optimizing your

app store content and making sure that it's most relevant and localized so that you'll get the most downloads in those regions and we have different hubs in north america europe and asia pacific so we can help depending on whatever platform you're trying to reach players on have you encountered instances where players have brought you games or developers have brought you a game or something and said look we want to take this to this market over here and you've taken a look at the game genre the style everything else and kind of thought this this isn't going to work for that particular region are there some things that just can't be localized yes and no i mean obviously there are different appetites and different games that are you know or genres that are more popular in different markets we don't necessarily provide the roi or consulting specifically on that but we might give feedback from a cultural perspective on what is most likely to be accepted in certain markets or what's you know the cultural preferences and then based on that you know the game developer

themselves might have to look at you know if it makes sense or if the roi is there to adapt the entire game um sometimes it requires just a few tweaks cutting out a few sections or adapting a few things other times like you said it just might not take in those markets how did you folks weather for pandemic did you notice any changes in the kind of things that were being requested of you or was it sort of business as usual just remotely during the pandemic one of the things that we noticed was due to the inability to go into offices or studios there was a lot of requests for remote recording so people who needed to record audio or dialogue of games in-game content and so we were able to do that through a cloud computing technology that we have where you can record from at-home studios and it provides high-quality top-quality recordings what's the biggest leap that's happened in the kind of the localization space because i imagine 10 years ago 15 years ago it literally was like right we just need to find someone who speaks whatever language it may be but now you're talking about i mean i realize there's a

lot of systems in place that are maybe ai driven and things like that but what's the biggest leap forward in the space so one of the biggest leaps forward that we've seen is basically around ai and machine translation about seven or ten years ago you had really bad machine translation or really good human translation right and so now as i mentioned before it's really become a productivity tool where the mix of both of those creates a hybrid approach which can be much more cost effective and actually a lot faster in terms of time to market so we're seeing it being incorporated in many more aspects of the work that we're doing however we still see that the human piece is is really necessary still we're we're not we're not there yet where ai is going to take over all our jobs and what are you folks working on for this year now the world's unlocked again is it back into the recording booths physically to take care of that stuff or are you going to be keeping some of that remote working kind of mindset we're definitely doing a bit of both right we're taking the best of both worlds in this case and we're able to

have people in our offices or in our studios or in our testing hubs however we're still also leveraging people being able to work from anywhere so we're able to leverage great talent and great voices or get great translators that maybe live in more rural or remote areas that normally wouldn't want to travel or wouldn't want to relocate for a full-time job but now we're able to work with those resources all over the world so it's definitely the best of both worlds we're combining both [Music] you